Reimagine Digital | Transform Now
Achieving cost savings and efficiency with digital procurement
PwC supported a global bank on their back office supply chain transformation journey by releasing capacity, delivering value and simplification of procurement processes.
Client: Global bank with a Singapore headquarters
Our role: Procurement advisory
Industry: Financial services
Country: Singapore
Setting the scene
With over 150 years of history in Singapore, our client is a global banking institution providing both personal and corporate banking services. As part of their culture of innovation, they have recently moved to digitally transform its finance, supply chain management and treasury functions. The objectives were focused on providing insights on spending and increasing staff engagement through increased automation, efficiency and reduced operational risk. The client had engaged PwC to design and deploy new cloud-based applications, SAP S/4Hana and SAP Ariba, in over 50 countries globally.
Challenges
Global implementation and transition
Determining a new operating model with redefined workflows for a large scale global implementation and transition of over 500 employees.
Inefficient workflow and inconsistent purchase approaches
The workflows of the incumbent system were inefficient and disparate, due to distinct business requirements across multiple procurement categories, departments and geographic regions. Stakeholders used multiple buying platforms for their purchasing needs, resulting in
- Increased risk of maverick expenditure
- Lower than desired usage of procurement catalogues
- Limited data to create global and local procurement categories
- Increased third party vendor risk
- Lower than desired e-procurement usage
Lack of single source of truth
The multiple third party vendor databases held duplicated and fragmented information. This lack of single source of truth created both procurement and ongoing vendor risk management challenges such as in finance, operations and data management.
How we helped
Our professionals from financial services procurement, risk management and agile delivery worked closely with the client to understand their needs and provide a holistic view to transformation. Our client achieved strong stakeholder buy-in through our agile delivery methods. Guided by our people centric change approach, the client co-created the new operating model supported by SAP S/4HANA and SAP Ariba with us. They were able to
- Providing real-time insight for the procurement team to identify sourcing opportunities
- Creating clear routes to buy for purchasers across the organisation
- Simplifying the supplier onboarding process
- Automating the purchase requisition and approval process through improved catalogue content
- Easier navigation for procurement users and business stakeholders
Result and impact
Within nine months, the new operating model powered by SAP S/4HANA and SAP Ariba went live across 50 countries and over 300 supply chain management teams.
- A total of USD20m of rapid sourcing opportunities were identified through vendor rationalisation and tail spend management, enabling greater savings
- Smoother supplier onboarding and budgetary approval process by a tailored risk management question set for over 200 categories of spend
- Over 50% purchase order automation by enabling over 100 new catalogues and defining the global buying channels for all spend categories, reducing the tedious and manual processes needed
- An end-to-end procurement process which reduced cost wastage through process elimination and standardisation
With the new ways of working unlocked by refining the procurement processes and operating model, the client successfully achieved greater visibility over their spend categories, reduce third party risks and increase their cost savings and employee efficiency.
